in the middle was rather younger and better looking than her
companions, and judging by her manners and her laugh, she was a
high-school girl in an upper form. I looked, not without impure
thoughts, at her bust, and at the same time reflected about her:
'She will be trained in music and manners, she will be married to
some Greek--God help us!--will lead a grey, stupid, comfortless
life, will bring into the world a crowd of children without knowing
why, and then will die. An absurd life!'

"I must say that as a rule I was a great hand at combining my lofty
ideas with the lowest prose.

"Thoughts of the darkness of the grave did not prevent me from
giving busts and legs their full due. Our dear Baron's exalted ideas
do not prevent him from going on Saturdays to Vukolovka on amatory
expeditions. To tell the honest truth, as far as I remember, my
attitude to women was most insulting. Now, when I think of that
high-school girl, I blush for my thoughts then, but at the time my
conscience was perfectly untroubled. I, the son of honourable
parents, a Christian, who had received a superior education, not
naturally wicked or stupid, felt not the slightest uneasiness when
I paid women _Blutgeld_, as the Germans call it, or when I followed
highschool girls with insulting looks. . . . The trouble is that
youth makes its demands, and our philosophy has nothing in principle
against those demands, whether they are good or whether they are
loathsome. One who knows that life is aimless and death inevitable
is not interested in the struggle against nature or the conception
of sin: whether you struggle or whether you don't, you will die and
rot just the same. . . . Secondly, my friends, our philosophy instils
even into very young people what is called reasonableness. The